


Tumblr Drabbles ABANDONED

by goingbadly



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece & Rome, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Alternate Universe - Western, Amnesia, Arranged Marriage, Brain Damage, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Genderbending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Were-Creatures, fem!Jim, fem!seb
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-01 20:41:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4033882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingbadly/pseuds/goingbadly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ABANDONED<br/>1. Jim remembers the fall. And Sebastian. But only on his good days.<br/>2. Sebastian is the Spartiate commander and Jim is the Athenian General at the Battle of Sphacteria.<br/>3. Sebastian is a ghost that haunts Jim's house.<br/>4. After the world ends, something goes wrong in Jim's head. Sebastian keeps him around.<br/>5. Jim kills the omega who was meant to marry the king, and takes his place without anyone noticing.<br/>6. Jim is a bankrobber. Sebastian is the sheriff - and Jim's childhood friend.<br/>7. Sebastian is a serial killer, and Jim is his psychiatrist after his arrest.<br/>8. Sebastian is in prison after Reichenbach, and believes Jim's dead. Spoilers: Not. Dead.<br/>9. Jim is a centuries old sidhe who migrated from Ireland in the eighteenth century. Sebastian happens to interrupt him in the middle of a turf war between faeries.<br/>10. Jamie Moriarty needs a sniper. Sabine Moran needs to crawl out of the bottom of a bottle.<br/>11. Sebastian wakes up under a wolfbane hood, to find a man waving a pink plastic bone in his face. The relationship goes downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Amnesia

**Author's Note:**

> This is 100% unbetad. Any typos you find win you a gold star!
> 
> If you leave a comment with your favorite drabble, I'll write a part two/extended version for one of them. <3

Jim comes awake thrashing – what’s left of him that _can_ thrash. His legs lie, still and withered, underneath the hospital blankets.

“Moran?” His voice is rough. He coughs, chokes, and tries again. “ _Moran._ ” This time there’s a note of fear in his voice. He’s always been sharp, Jim. Always caught on quick.

He knows something’s wrong.

Sebastian hurriedly sets his magazine down on the bedside table and leans forward, taking Jim’s hand. “I’m here.”

“And the empire?” Jim’s first question, always. In Sebastian’s grip his hand is brittle and bony, barely more than skin and spite. He squeezes down. Sebastian knows that Jim means it to hurt. It doesn’t, and Seb’s pretty sure that’s worse.

The empire’s gone, but Jim doesn’t need to know that. “It’s fine,” Seb lies. “Waiting for you.”

Jim’s eyes narrow, dangerously. Once upon a time lying to him would have been suicide – but when Jim stretches his neck out to the side Sebastian can see the short patch of hair growing in over the back of his skull. Lying to Jim’s not easy – it never will be – but it’s not impossible anymore.

Jim’s eyelashes are startlingly dark against his sunken, yellow cheeks. “Mmm,” he hums, and licks his lips. They’re almost white. All the blood has drained from Jim’s body, into those dead limbs under the sheets. Sebastian wonders if he’s tried to move yet; if he already knows that he can’t.

It’d be like Jim, not to say anything. To savor Sebastian’s guilt and helplessness.

Sebastian realizes he’s starting to squeeze Jim’s hand, and forces himself to stop. Jim has brittle bones; bird bones. Sebastian could snap him, without even realizing.

“How long have I been out?”

 _Six months, two weeks, four days, and counting._ “A few days. What do you remember?”

“None of your business,” Jim says back, slow and lazy. He takes his time looking around the room, deep black eyes drinking in every detail. Sebastian wonders what he sees. There’s nothing here, after all; white walls, empty beds, the soft sunlight fading through the window. Sebastian thought about moving him – but the hospital room had made _sense,_ with the lies. If Jim’d really been out for only a few days, the hospital wouldn’t have let him go.

Sebastian tried to tell Jim the truth, at first. It had only upset him.

“Sebastian,” Jim murmurs, calling his attention. Seb blinks. He’s been staring at nothing; at the space in Jim’s wrist where the hollow between bones is visible. He looks up quickly, trying to clear his face, and catches the full weight of Jim’s gaze.

Jim’s looking at Sebastian with a sharpness he hasn’t had in months. Since the bullet. Since St. Barts. For a moment, hope flickers in Sebastian’s chest – hot and bright and painful as fire.

“You’re lying to me,” Jim says, gently. “You’ve lost 2 stone and you haven’t shaved in three days.” He extracts his hand from Sebastian’s and holds it up to the light. Between his fingers the skin is so thin from starvation that it almost seems translucent; like Jim’s fading away into nothing. “ _I’ve_ lost weight.”

He doesn’t sound scared, yet, but that’ll come. When he realizes how much he’s lost, he’ll be terrified. Then he’ll be angry with Sebastian, for seeing. Then he’ll firm his jaw and narrow his eyes and hiss – _I’m going to kill him for this, Moran._

And then he’ll sleep, and in the morning – “ _Moran? **Moran**.”_ Again, and again, and again.

Sebastian feels like he’s being waterboarded; like he’s been drowning for months, but can’t seem to die. “What do you remember?” he repeats.

 _St. Barts,_ Jim had said, the first time. The nurses thought he’d get better. A week later he’d remembered the pool, and they’d stopped telling Sebastian he’d be home in a few days. At the end of the month Sebastian had asked, _what do you remember,_ and Jim said, _did we ever tell the cabbie he should go after Sherlock? That’d be so funny,_ and the doctor started talking _long-term._

Something glitters behind Jim’s eyes; the last flicker of a dying candle, that sun-bright intellect going dark. He’s looking at Sebastian carefully; like he used to, before Sherlock, when he was still trying to figure Sebastian out. Outside, the sun is setting, and an ambulance is wailing itself across the pavement. “I remember…” Jim starts, slowly. A frown creases his face for a moment, and then is gone. Whatever he’s going to say stops in his throat, and Jim stares expressionlessly at Sebastian for a moment before he speaks again. “I’m losing things, aren’t I?”

It’s not what Sebastian expected, although he probably should know better by now. Jim’s never predictable – not even at the best of times. “Yeah.”

Jim reaches forward, runs his fingers down Sebastian’s jaw. “Poor Moran,” he says, dreamily. “How you must be hurting.”

Sebastian controls his flinch, but it costs him. “What?”

“How you must _bleed_ for me. We were lovers,” Jim says matter-of-factly. He cups Sebastian’s face, and leans forward. His breath is foul, hot on Sebastian’s lips. “Oh, Moran. I don’t remember _that._ But it’s all over you. Poor dear. Did I _love_ you?”

When Sebastian flinches back, Jim laughs. He keeps laughing – maybe he can’t stop, maybe he can’t bring himself to. He throws his head back so the short-shaved hair on the back of his head brushes his bony shoulders, and the skin stretches so tight over his face he looks like little more than a skull. He laughs until he’s breathless – until the heartbeat monitor at the bedside starts to beep nervously, until the nurse hurries in with a needle. As she sticks it in his arm, Jim reaches out – still giggling – for Sebastian.

“No, Seb, _please,_ ” he mocks, purposefully cruel, “I _need_ you – “

Because he doesn’t remember, because he thinks it’s _funny_ that he tore out Sebastian’s heart. He doesn’t stop grinning; not even when the drugs kick in and he starts to slip sideways. Not even when his hand reaches out over the blankets of its own accord, instinctively seeking Sebastian’s touch.

Sebastian takes it without hesitating, folding Jim’s bony fingers up in his own palms. Jim’s cold, these days. He doesn’t ever seem to get warm. Sebastian holds Jim’s hand tight, until it goes limp and Jim can no longer tell he’s there. Until Jim’s rigid form goes loose on the bed, tumbling uneasily into a fitful sleep.

Sebastian lets Jim’s hand slide to the bed and leans forward, brushing Jim’s hair gently away from his eyes. _He’ll need a haircut soon,_ Sebastian thinks, and picks the magazine back up.


	2. Greek AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a hundred percent factually accurate, although I take most of my information from Thucydides. (The arrow thing is almost a direct quote). [ More on the Battle of Sphacteria](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria) or [ go read Thucydides for yourself](http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html)

“Sir,” one of the heralds murmurs, hesitating at the door of Moriarty’s tent.

Moriarty stills his quill in the ink, and looks up. The boy is young – barely able to grow a beard – and wearing light clothing that would fit under hoplite armor. He’s smeared with dust and blood, muscles shuddering in his shoulders and neck as he tries not to pant. _We’ve won,_ Moriarty thinks, with a vague surprise.

 _Give me an army and I’ll defeat the Spartans in twenty days_ had sounded good when he said it to the Athenian council, but Moriarty hadn’t _really_ thought he could pullit off. _A month might have been more reasonable –_

 _It shouldn’t have been this easy,_ Moriarty thinks. There’s a weird sort of pressure in his throat, choking his breath. It feels like disappointment. “What do you want?” he asks the herald irritably. “Tell them to dispose of the Spartiate corpses and offer the helots their freedom in exchange for five years work on the long walls in Athens. The freemen can be compensated, and – “

“Sir,” the boy interrupts, quieter. “They’ve taken a hundred Spartiate soldiers alive.”

Dead silence.

For once, Moriarty’s brain goes absolutely, blissfully, white. It’s like the flash of the sun on seawater – so bright for a moment his eyes don’t seem to work. _Spartiate soldiers. A hundred Spartiate soldiers. Alive. It can’t be._

All of Greece knows the stories – Spartiates are born to the blade and blooded by slaughtering helot slaves. The Spartiate school only takes the finest of the citizen boys. From the time they can walk they are molded. Their ability to question their command is destroyed, as is any loyalty that isn’t to the Twin Kings. By the time the boys of Sparta have been spat back out as Spartiates, they are perfect machines. Inhuman, inflexible, incapable of thinking for themselves. The backbone of the Spartan army, predictable and unstoppable as the tide.

If Moriarty has taken one – even _one_ – true Spartiate alive, they will never stop singing his name.

“Take me to them,” he says, standing hurriedly. The quill he leaves in the ink. When he comes back later, it’ll be ruined. It hardly matters.

_A hundred Spartiate soldiers as prisoners of Athens. Pleistoanax would ransom Sparta herself to get them back._

As the herald leads Moriarty around the curve of the island to the Spartans fortifications Moriarty can’t help adjusting his chlamys, arranging the folds to hide the slenderness of his shoulders and waist. He feels like a bird adjusting its plumage, pumping itself up to look bigger. He does it anyways. Jim can still remember the first time he’d seen Spartiates in battle. It was during one of the invasions of Attica, ten – no, twelve years ago now.

At first, he thought he looked upon the gods.

They’d moved as a single, inseparable unit; eight men deep, in gleaming copper chest-plates that shone like the sun. Their spears had been a forest; their steps had been thunder. Not a single one of them faltered, or broke rhythm, or even spoke. They all looked similar enough to be brothers to a man; the same height, same build, same way of walking. Graceful and stiff at the same time, somehow, like a horse picking its way between river-stones.

Moriarty had watched as his village burned, trampled under their flawless march, and he’d felt nothing but awe and curiosity. Later, once he knew better, he’d curse the Spartans for idiots – inflexible in tactics, _excruciatingly_ slow to decide anything, reluctant to take risks. Moriarty was Athenian, after all; the fiercest naval warriors the world had ever seen. His people prized creativity and originality. In Athens, Moriarty’s talents were recognized – in Sparta, they would have been snuffed out. The Spartans are – in Moriarty’s opinion, and the general opinion of the Athenians – too conservative, too cautious, and too cowardly. The Spartiates are wasted potential. Sparta fears Athens for its innovation, Persia for its strength, Egypt for its history. Sometimes Moriarty thinks Sparta only made its Spartiate soldiers so bright to drive away the fear of the night –

But he never forgets that first look, when he thought Apollo himself had come down and made soldiers.

When they get to the edge of the island, up against the cliffs, Moriarty clasps his hands behind his back and tries to look regal. The Spartiate prisoners are bound, on their knees, beside the burnt-out ruins of their camp. Moriarty reads what happened in a glance. There had been the smoke – it must have been blindingly thick, while the fire was still burning. His own flanking plan brought the lighter-equipped Athenian troops up the cliffs, where no hoplite could have passed. The Spartiates were taken blind and unawares, and the helots had broke under the promise of freedom. Moriarty imagines the Spartiate hoplites, stumbling through the smoke, trying to find an enemy to stick their automaton swords in, and feels his lip start curl in a sneer. Everything had gone exactly to plan. They couldn’t have played their part better if he paid them to –

 _Except,_ he reminds himself, _Except, except, they **surrendered.**_

A few of the Spartiates are glaring at Moriarty, open hatred and distrust clear on their faces. Most are staring at their knees. They are shirtless; stripped of their shining armor and the distinctive crimson chlamys of Sparta. Somehow, they look smaller without it. No gods, these. Just starved men. It’s been a long siege. There were 400 Spartiates here when Athenian ships cut the island off from the mainland; most of those are dead from one battle or another. The 120 men who remain of the Spartiate forces are smeared with muck and grime and weak from hunger. It’s clear from the shock in their faces that they’re still reeling from the battle.

But they _are_ Spartiates. At least one is kneeling, straight-backed, with wounds that should kill him. Moriarty notices a man in the second row who’s arm has been severed at the elbow. He’s been bound with a raggedy tourniquet, torn from the crimson fabric of a Spartan chlamys. Even though his eyes are unfocused his chin is raised, jaw straight, shoulders back. The sneer on Moriarty’s face starts to turn, unwilling, into a smile.

 _Something about them,_ he thinks, _even after all these years. The very best wind-up toys ever made…_

But no one is bearing the insignia of their commanding officers. Moriarty frowns. “Where is Epitadas?” he asks the herald. The herald hesitates.

In front of them, one of the Spartiates shifts on his knees. A big man, with unusual colouring. He has white-blonde hair, like straw, sticking sweat-damp against his pale skin. Even under the baking sun, he is the color of warm milk and honey. _A child’s skin on a man._ Moriarty gives the Spartiate a long, searching look. There are three gashes across his chest, unbound, still weeping blood into the dirt. Just like the other injured, though, the Spartiate ignores them with a vague sort of distain. He doesn’t even raise his head as Moriarty stares.

“Sir,” the herald tells Moriarty, drawing Moriarty’s attention back with an apologetic bob at the waist, “Epitadas is dead. As are Hippagretas and Styphon. In the battle…”

The Spartiates had lost the commanding officer of their troop, as well as his first and second. Moriarty sniffs, trying to fight down the feeling that his victory is curdling in his stomach. _Without their commanding officers, they couldn’t have done much more than flail their arms at us –_

“I wonder if that’s what happened,” Moriarty says bitterly, more to himself than the herald. “The best men were shot down first.” Moriarty scans over the crowd one more time. The kneeling men have enough sense to look ashamed at his words, but he can’t bring himself to care. He turns away, continuing venomously over his shoulder, “I don’t have Spartiate prisoners. I have a bunch of cowards, and the men of honour are all already dead – “

“Arrows would be a worth a hell of a lot more,” interrupts a low, rough voice, “If they could tell good soldiers from bad.”

Moriarty whirls. “ _Who said that?_ ” He demands.

To a man, the Spartiates stare at their knees. There’s a different tenor in their silence, now; a defiance, a wry humour in the face of death. A moment before they’d been a hundred brave men kneeling in solitude; now they are a single, unbreakable force. One of their own has spoken up; they’d rather die than give him away.

 _More loyal than the gods themselves,_ Moriarty thinks, and despite himself he feels a flicker of interest. “I asked who spoke,” he repeats, forcing himself not to snarl.

In the front row, the blonde man raises his head. _Unusual colouring,_ Moriarty had thought. But maybe _striking_ would be a better word. His eyes are a clear, cloudless blue, like the surface of the sea. In his pale face they seem to burn, fierce and defiant. There’s something about his eyes of Zeus’s lightning, rather than Poseidon’s waves. It’s echoed in the white shock of his hair, the sharp line of his jaw like a slash. He looks like he was born and made of flames and thunderstorms. A long ragged scar juts across his nose like a bolt, from a blade that must have snagged in his helm and narrowly avoided his eye. He looks – well, he looks like the Spartiates look in the plays. Handsome and bold and favored by the gods.

“I spoke,” the Spartiate says. His voice is thunder, too – a low rumble sharper than any roll of a drum. _Zeus’s child –_ Jim thinks, again, _As if he’d come straight from the loins of the god_. “And I will speak again, should you need to hear it twice.”

 _And bold – unbelievably bold, for a Spartiate soldier._ Curiosity itches in the back of Moriarty’s mind, crawls over his skin. He gestures his herald to silence, and folds his arms over his chest. “What is your name, Spartan?”

“Moran.” The Spartiate raises his chin, letting the white line of his scar tissue catch the light rippling off the surface of the ocean. He stares at Jim down the length of his aquiline nose, full lips twisted into a scowl. “I’ve taken command here. I’ve told my men to stand down, and it’s _my_ word they stand down on.”

 _True,_ which is even more interesting. They listened to him; they followed him. They even did the unthinkable and laid down their arms, because he commanded it so.

 _And he did command,_ Moriarty thinks, _He stepped forward. He thought for himself._ Moriarty runs over the Spartiate tactics in his head, and in hindsight he can see it. There had been a change, in the third day of the siege; the Spartan patrols had become impossible to predict. They’d changed tactics, adapted, evolved without asking permission from their command off the island. If Moriarty hadn’t sent his own men through the supposedly impassable cliffs –

 _He might have adapted to **you,** _ something whispers in Moriarty’s ear. _He came through their schools, twenty years of their brow-beating, and he still **thinks –**_

“Moran,” Moriarty says. Something lurches and twists in his stomach. A vast rift opens inside him like a whirlpool, a deep sucking hole that goes down past his feet into the earth itself. It’s hunger, unlike anything Moriarty has ever known. Curiosity, and hunger, and lust.

“Take the rest of the prisoners to the ships,” he hears himself say to the herald. “Give them food, and drink. Athens can hold them, until Pleistoanax is ready to hear reason.”

“The rest, sir?” The herald asks.

Moriarty can’t seem to drag his eyes away from Moran. Blonde hair, blue eyes, anger and desperation and frustration like electricity sparking along every line of his kneeling frame.

“This one is for me,” he says, softly – but not so soft that Moran will not hear. Moriarty needs him to hear. He needs him to _know._ “Take Moran to my tent.”

“You won’t break me,” Moran snarls back. “Athenian _degenerate.”_

Moriarty smiles. They tried to break Moran, he knows. The Spartiate School tried – as they try with every Spartan – but no amount of hard beds and small meals was ever going to extinguish the fire Zeus placed in those eyes. It’s blazing now; like Moran’s thinking of fighting his way out of the Athenian camp, unarmed, on his knees.

Moriarty wants him with an intensity that makes his knees feel weak and the sea air feel cold. He plans to stoke that fire, build it up, bank it blue and white and gold until it consumes them both. Moran’s teeth are bared, glinting like fangs in his narrow face.

“And wine,” Moriarty adds, to the herald. “Bring wine for us both.”


	3. Sebastian is a Ghost

Jim’s pretty sure he’s going insane. _More_ insane than usual. Either that, or he’s got a ghost.

Things in Conduit Street pick themselves up when he’s not looking, move around in the night. Jim would investigate, only, it’s not that he _minds._ Jim looks over into the kitchen and the kettle flicks itself on, as if in answer to his half-formed desire for some tea. He leaves his cigarettes burning and someone snuffs them out before he can ruin his suits or his carpets. Jim puts his cups near the edge of the table and someone pushes them back, just an inch, so they don’t topple over.

Jim comes home late and somebody’s ordered takeout on his credit card, set it up in the kitchen _._

After a while, it just becomes part of life at Conduit Street; Jim runs the Empire and the ghost, whatever it is, runs the house. It’s a little like living with a very shy nanny. The ghost picks up after Jim. When he doesn’t eat, the ghost leaves a pile of takeout menus on the table so high it starts to fall over, which might be its version of chiding.

Jim doesn’t press, because he really just doesn’t have the _time._

Maybe they’d have stayed like that forever, only one night Jim comes home with a bullet hole through his hip, and an invisible pressure gently but inexorably pushes him down on the couch and stitches him shut. That – okay, _that_ is a little bit impossible to ignore. Especially since Jim can hear some distinct and decidedly unangelic muttering coming from his guardian spirit.

_“Stupid, reckless, **impossible –“**_

“I had to, Mom,” Jim mumbles back, more than a little loopy from the pain. “He said I was a _sissy…_ ”

He gets the distinct impression someone is laughing.

***

The oven door slams. Opens. Slams again.

“God _damn_ it, Sebastian!” Jim yells down the stairs, stubbing his cigarette out on a book in front of him. “ _What!”_

He’s scrambling, running on nothing but nicotine and coffee. The latest shipment of ketamine from India had just over the regular potency rate, which started out as not Jim’s problem but has quickly become an issue. People are idiots, and drug addicts are worse. There’s been ten overdoses so far. Cutting the drugs down so the Empire doesn’t have to deal with a string of dead dealers has been a nightmare and a half. It’s been a day – three days? A week? – since Jim’s slept, and the world has started to go just a little bit screwy at the edges.

Which doesn’t excuse _Sebastian,_ slamming the oven door, _again._

“What?!” Jim demands, stomping down to the kitchen. “Did you need your kitty litter changed? Kibble? I’m _busy –_ “ The kitchen is empty, of course, but there’s a takeout menu strategically placed on the table. Jim rolls his eyes. “No, I don’t need a _snack,_ thank you _._ Is that all? Can Daddy go back to work now?” The timer on the stove beeps. It’s three in the morning, apparently. “I don’t need a _nap,_ either.”

He gets the distinct feeling that someone’s scowling at him from the rafters. There’s an ominous weight to the air. Jim’s used to this, by now; it’s Sebastian’s favorite sulking technique. He puts his hands on his hips and taps his toe.

Right on cue, the walls start to drip with thick, viscous blood. Dark crimson streams collect and gather, spilling from the ceiling and the doors. The smell of copper and gore is heavy on the air, like Jim’s walked into a crime scene. The rivulets stain everything they touch, leaving a red residue on the furniture. Streams of gore fall over the top of the cabinets, bloody and menacing.

Jim’s not impressed. “I’ve seen it before,” he tells the ceiling. Sebastian is – for all his bluster – mainly a benign poltergeist. The most he’s ever hurt Jim is during medical care, and even then his invisible fingers had been gentle. Jim’s reasonably sure Sebastian’s threats are always going to be empty. “I need to finish this, Sebastian. It needs to be done. I’ll sleep after – ”

The blood seems to hesitate, shimmering in and out of reality. Then there’s the faintest whisp of a voice at Jim’s ear. “What can I offer? To get you to take a break?”

Jim considers it for a moment, and grins. “Show me your face, baby boy. We’ll see what I can do for that.” It’s not a new request, and he doesn’t really expect Sebastian to say yes.

But there’s a considerate silence, then the blood on the walls blinks out of visibility like someone’s thrown a switch. “Four hours of sleep,” the voice barters, “And a full meal.”

Jim grins wider, baring his teeth to the empty room. “ _After_ I get a good look at you.” He keeps his excitement off his face. Number one rule of winning with the hand you’ve got – never show how much the stakes mean to you.

Silence. Then there’s a huff of air through the kitchen, like a sigh, and the tension in the air starts to ease. Jim uncrosses his arms and sways himself back and forth off the balls of his feet, doing his best impression of an impatient child. “Well?” A book falls off the shelf in the library, hitting the ground with a solid _thunk._ Jim rolls his eyes. “Melodramatist,” he complains, as he obediently pads over to fetch it.

It’s an old book, leather-bound, and Jim doesn’t remember buying it. Maybe it came with the house – more likely, it came with the ghost. He turns it over in his hands. The leather is dyed a deep shade of forest green, and the inscription on the front cover is picked out in gold leaf. “ _Three Months in the Jungle,”_ Jim reads aloud. “A memoir…?”

Sebastian doesn’t bother to answer.

Jim shrugs and opens the book, flipping through the worn pages. It’s older than he thought, at first. The publisher’s date on the inside cover is 1884, and the ink of the pages is faded by time. He skims a bit at the beginning – enough to tell that it is, in fact, a memoir – and the name _Sebastian_ catches his eye. Jim marks his place with a finger, and reads, “ _I was born in London in 1840, the son of Sir Augustus Moran, CB, sometime Minister to Persia. He named me Sebastian, after my grandfather. I was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford before embarking upon a military career. But what concerns us is the time I spent after I left the service…_ A military man, then, Sebastian?” No response. Jim shrugs, and continues flipping. There’s enough in the book to make him think he might come back and read it again, when he isn’t sleep deprived. There’s something in his tone that’s both funnier and more poetic than Jim was expecting. He writes like a cynical man with a beautiful soul, someone precious the world ground down to dust.

 _Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?_ Jim stares blankly at one of the pages. This man – the ruthless game hunter and military veteran – is really the same man who orders Jim takeout. This is the man who sulks over Jim leaving his laundry on the floor, and worries about how much sleep Jim’s getting.

_Guess death really changes a man._

“Interesting,” Jim says, finally, his finger over a passage about tiger-hunting, “But hardly what I asked for…”

Before he can even finish speaking, a yellowed scrap of paper tugs itself out of the back of the book. Jim catches it as it drifts to the floor, and finds himself holding an old photograph. It’s a formal portrait, the subject – a blonde man – seated in an uncomfortable looking suit with his hands braced rigidly on his knees. “You?” Jim asks, somewhat rhetorically.

There’s no one else it could be.

He looks more like the soldier than the care-taker ghost. In life, Sebastian’s hair was light, coiffed elegantly across his brow. His eyes, as well; so pale that the camera hadn’t picked up an iris at all. Underneath his suit his chest is broad, fabric straining over the muscles of his shoulders as he leans forward. The camera caught him just starting to smile, the side of his lip twisted upwards. It would be a captivating photo, on its own. But the scars – oh, the _scars,_ those make it _fascinating_. Jim traces them hungrily with his eyes, drinking them in. Sebastian’s face is bisected brow to lip; and again, horizontally in a wide slash over his nose. It screws his expression, making Sebastian’s eyes seem narrow and glittering in what would otherwise have been a beautiful face. When he was alive, Sebastian Moran would have been a striking man. Even in the aged photograph, it’s possible to see that. On his knees, his hands are long-fingered and graceful; nails clipped and neatly trimmed. Capable hands. _Deadly_ hands.

“Well,” Jim says, softly. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”Something softer, maybe. Something polite and old-timey and quant. Maybe an apron under a fleshy face, with short hands made for nursing. “It does beg the question, Sebastian. Why are you taking care of me now?”

The room is silent, and for all Jim knows, empty. Jim purposefully doesn’t think about how well the face in the photo suits his tastes. He forces himself not to wonder what Sebastian would have smelt like, tasted like, how warm and solid he might have been under Jim’s hands. He turns the photograph over in his hand, but there’s nothing written on the back.

After a long moment, Jim puts the book back on the shelf and locks the information away deep in his mind. It doesn’t do to dwell, and whatever Sebastian was – he’s not anymore. Now he’s Jim’s ghost – polite, solicitous, a little bit _naggy_ at the worst of times.

It is only a year later that Jim realizes Sebastian is, in fact, still dangerous. When he wants to be.

***

Jim didn’t think anyone would ever attack Conduit Street.

Most criminals are too smart to try – going after Moriarty in his own house is a lot like going after the guillotine with your head in the basket, but whatever. Eventually, somebody’s dumb enough. Eventually, they track Jim down like a fox in his hole, and they bring enough guns that even _he_ can’t slip out on his own.

Jim has to admit, the blanket cut-off of cell-signals in London is a nice touch. If a bit expensive. _There might be government in on this one,_ he admits to himself, limping up the stairs with a bullet hole in his right calf and a Beretta in his hand. _Didn’t think I’d pissed them off yet this month._ His heel hits one of the steps hard and he hisses to himself at the pain. He can feel chips of bone flake off in his mouth as he grinds his teeth, and he has to stop at the second flight to wipe blood out of his eyes. He’s panting, Jim realizes – out of breath and harried, like a wild animal on the run. Jim spits behind him on the stairs, in the vague direction of the men following him. They’re going slow, now, securing each exit and escape. They know there’s only one way this is going to end now.

Jim wonders if they’ll try to burn the house down; smoke him out. He hopes so. He always liked the idea of burning in hell.

Jim slams the office door shut behind him and leans on it, still breathing hard and heavy. He reaches down to feel the extent of the injury in his calf, but a dizzying wave of pain makes him straighten and take several deep breaths instead. It feels like he’s on fire already; his leg and chest are burning, his lungs howling with the effort of drawing breath. Jim’s head sags back on the door and he shuts his eyes, letting his head spin dizzily for a moment. There’s a vast darkness around his thoughts, like drowsiness, and he thinks half-heartedly, _I’ll just rest a minute,_ forgetting that they’re already on the stairs behind him.

 _Are you alright?_ a voice asks in the darkness. A low, deep voice, rich like the rumble of an impossibly large cat purring.

“I don’t think so,” Jim answers, honestly. He can taste blood on his tongue; and concrete-dust, from earlier, from when they shot the wheels out of his car and he’d gone tumbling face-first into the pavement. “You may have the house to yourself, ghostie.” Jim’s having trouble keeping himself up. His knees seem to loose tension and all of a sudden he’s sliding, hitting his ass on the floor.

There’s a fleeting pressure at his temple like cool fingertips, soft and soothing after the pain. Jim leans into the touch.

 _Will you stay in the office, if I ask?_ The voice wonders out loud. Those blessedly cool fingertips stroke down Jim’s face to his jaw, tilt his head upwards. _Keep the door shut. Don’t look out._

Jim doesn’t think he’s in any state to go peeking on his poltergeist’s business. “Probably couldn’t if I tried,” he tells Sebastian. He might be hallucinating now, come to think of it. Sebastian’s not really the _touchy-feely_ sort.

And the brush of a thumb over his lips – a calloused thumb, worn from the grip of a rifle, broad and strong – ?

“I don’t think I’m feeling so good,” Jim slurs.

 _Shh. Shh._ Invisible fingers stroke through his hair, combing it into place. _You stay here, a chuisle mo chroí._

Jim starts to laugh. “Funny,” he whispers, and even to himself his voice sounds broken, “Because there _isn’t_ a pulse in your heart – “

***

When Jim wakes up, there are paramedics in the house. He’d fight, only he has the distinct impression Sebastian would stop him. He’s not interested in crossing Sebastian, right now. He might not have been able to _see_ what happened, but he could hear. _My polite wee ghostie,_ Jim thinks, almost hysterically. _He_ ’s going to have nightmares about the screaming, and that’s _saying_ something.

The paramedics take him downstairs on a stretcher, and the house – there’s not a word for what’s been done to the house.

 _Demolished_ might come close, even though all the furniture is still standing _._ Conduit Street looks like a very selective hurricane blew through it. The men who tried to attack Jim are spattered off the walls, ripped limb from limb by sheer brute force. He can see their helmets, crushed inwards, fragments of bone and brain blown outwards by the implosion. Each of their guns has been dismantled into its component parts and strewn around the room, bullets imbedded in the walls and the ceiling along with bits of slide and chamber.

They’d tried to fire, but there had been nothing to hit.

Jim licks his lips, ignoring the pain in his leg long enough to stay conscious as they roll him down the front steps out of the building. He counts two – four – six – not a man who came after him has survived. The ring leader is ripped in half crotch to crown, his right side on the kitchen table and his left side in a body-bag by the door. He’d been hanging over it, according to the Scotland Yard officer looking pale in the corner of the room. They come to get Jim’s statement, of course. But for once no one suspects him of murder. Nothing human could have killed these men. The room smells of shit and piss and blood, overwhelming and horrific by its sheer intensity. It stinks like a charnel house.

And yet, not a single item of Jim’s is ruined. The spatter avoids his bookshelves, his computer, even the untouched breakfast on the table. _That,_ Jim supposes, might have been a pointed comment from Sebastian. _Typical._ As they carry him out the front door Jim tries not to grin. He’s supposed to be in shock, after all. They’ve given him a blanket.

But when he looks up at the windows of the house, there’s a man standing there; blonde hair, blue eyes, so pale a camera might not be able to pick up the iris at all. It’s hard to fight a smile. Jim raises a hand to him and the man, grim-faced, nods.

 _I’ll come home soon,_ Jim wants to say, but he supposes Sebastian doesn’t have much choice but to wait.

***

Jim takes flowers to the grave, on his way home from the hospital. Bit of a sentimental gesture, but he can’t really help himself. The stone is clean marble, white and weathered, and the inscription simply reads “ _Sebastian Moran. Born 1840 Died 1902. In the Midst of Life He was in Death,”_ which Jim likes because he’s reasonably sure it’s a subtle insult.

He leaves poppy, for restful sleep; holly, for domestic happiness; and red mistletoe as a bit of a joke. _Kiss me._

Jim’s not sure what makes it funny; the fact that it can never happen, or maybe the chance that he _wants_ it to. Jim leans forward and puts his hand on the gravestone, rubbing his thumb over the rough marble. _In the vast scheme of things, what’s a hundred years? Life’s little jokes… We were so close to meeting._

The gravestone doesn’t have anything to say.

Jim shrugs, turns up his collar, and trudges back towards home.

When he gets there the house is freezing; so cold Jim’s breath is visible in the hallway and his teeth chatter in the bedroom. Jim spends half an hour trying to turn the heat up, but the thermostat seems to be broken and Sebastian’s nowhere to be found. He balls himself up in blankets in the living room, shivering and miserable.

The only reason he figures out what’s going on is that Sebastian sniffs – disdainfully, and quite audibly – when the pain in Jim’s leg makes him grunt. Jim’s brain jumps to makes the connection, and he grits his teeth with frustration.

When he can’t take it anymore he pokes his nose out of his nest of blankets. “I won’t get shot again, you _idiot_ , but I may _freeze_ ,” he hisses.

His words are met by a long, reluctant pause. Then there’s a rustle like footsteps, out of the room, and Jim hears the furnace turn begrudgingly on. “ _Take care of yourself next time, a chuisle mo chroí,”_ Sebastian whispers.

“Why?” Jim shoots back, “When I have you to do it for me?”


	4. Post-Apocalypse

Sebastian hangs off the throne of bones with Jim before him on a leash. “Careful,” Sebastian says, when someone gets too close. “He bites.”

Jim bares his teeth as if in agreement. He’s got bloodstains up the front of his shirt and over his face, and he never bothers to clean them. Sebastian supposes he likes them, but then, Sebastian can’t tell with Jim anymore.

He put the leash on himself, about a year back, and Sebastian hasn’t bothered to stop him. Jim didn’t explain, beyond – _better this way_ – and Sebastian, more or less, lets him do what he wants. It freaks some of the lesser thugs out, at least. And then there’d been that time Jim had actually torn someone’s throat out with his teeth, so, maybe he’d been right about needing it.

Sebastian shifts uncomfortably on his throne. “Who’s next?” he asks, gruffly.

Jim watches him with glittering black eyes, and Sebastian can’t help but feel that Jim’s still waiting for a moment of weakness. There’s nothing human left in those eyes, not anymore, but sometimes Sebastian thinks there’s something worse; something huge and insane and impossibly intelligent, like a monster from a dream walking loose. Sometimes Jim says things now that don’t make sense until years afterwards, or until it’s too late, or only when you whisper them to yourself in the middle of the night.

Sebastian thinks the bombs changed things in all of them, but then again, sometimes he thinks Jim was like this _before._ Sometimes he thinks this is what Jim was trying to stave off, when he talked about being bored.

One of the warlords from Eastern Scotland is here over a territory dispute in the Islands. He steps forward reluctantly, eyeing Jim and Sebastian with equal amounts fear and respect. Sebastian breathes out heavily through his nose and shifts on the throne again, finding a more comfortable position. Not that it helps. Monstrous uncomfortable chair.

“What is it?” he asks, shortly.

“It’s the Hebrides,” the Scot mumbles finally. “We were hoping to storm them this summer, and if you would cede your claim – “

At the bottom of the throne, Jim giggles. Sebastian’s mouth snaps shut, instantly, and he sits forward to see what Jim’s doing. Doesn’t do to ignore Jim, after all.

Like some awful witch from a fairy-tale Jim is barefoot in tatters, the blood and dirt on his hands staining his skin and making his nails seem like claws. He twists his head up to the side, like an owl. His big black eyes are clear and flawless as a mirror. He looks up at Sebastian with his chin tilted to one side, smiling, and Sebastian realizes just how silent the room has gone.

“You promised me Ireland,” Jim sing-songs, into the silence. “You promised to save it for me, or me for it, don’t you _remember?_ Poor Helena’s son. Always too late, aren’t you.” He laughs again, soft and delicate. “I heard they hung parliament from Big Ben after we left London. Poor Augustus should have been swinging with them, only, they couldn’t find the corpse. Poor _Ruaidhri Ua Conchubair,_ too late again…” He trails off into silence, mumbling under his breath. No one else speaks or moves.

Sebastian has the distinct and unpleasant impression that they’ve heard from his court auger. He grimaces, and rubs a hand over his face, trying to think. It doesn’t really help. The Hebrides have a few remaining military bases that’d be useful, if he could storm them without many casualties. There isn’t much oil, or anything by way of food stores – the UK government had about given up, by the time it’d been pushed back that far. But there were rumours of fresh water, last he’s heard. If he still has a claim to the islands, it might be best to defend them. Sebastian sighs, and opens his mouth to tell the Scot he can’t give it to them.

“Rathlin,” Jim whispers, his fingers twisting anxiously together in his lap. “ _Rathlin,_ Sebastian.” His voice snaps up in volume with quick urgency, as if he’s warning of a blade to Sebastian’s back. Then it’s gone again – Jim subsides back into murmurs, winding himself up in his chains and sitting at the foot of the throne.

 _Rathlin,_ Sebastian thinks, staring at the back of Jim’s head. _Where have I heard that before?_

It takes him a minute, but he gets it; _Rathlin,_ as in the Rathlin Island massacre, during the conquest of Ireland. The English had come to Rathlin Island, after all the troops were gone, and killed the women and children. Sebastian wonders sometimes if Jim picks obscure references as a joke – to test Sebastian on his history and literary education, or even just to remind Sebastian that something like that existed. Back before the bomb.

“Rathlin,” Sebastian murmurs to himself, and he can hear people in the room muttering. Some of the more superstitious of them think Jim is cursed, and well, they’re probably right. He raises his voice above the whispering. “No. You may take the Hebrides. We… we cede our claim.” There’s more noise at that. Sebastian’s not the only one who’s heard rumours of fresh food and supplies on the Eastern Islands.

Jim, at the food of the throne, smiles his empty insane smile, and says nothing.

Sebastian wonders if he knows; that Sebastian conquered Ireland for him, that there isn’t a man between here and the Pacific who doesn’t bow to them. He wonders if Jim remembers anything, if he still exists somewhere behind those great dark eyes. Sebastian wonders if he found the right ingredients, if he might put Jim back together; like Humpty Dumpty, falling upwards out of insanity and back on top of the wall.

Jim whistles to himself, a magpie-cry, and Sebastian grits his teeth. _Better not to wonder,_ he tells himself. _Better not to hope._


	5. Alpha-Omega Royalty

The dresses they give to omega brides are _awful._ Jim raises his chin – _again_ – trying to get away from the stiff lace of the collar. “Are you _certain_ this fits?” he asks his tailor, with just enough of a threat in his voice to get the man to take him seriously. Unfortunately, all Jim gets for his troubles is a regretful nod and a sniff.

He rolls his eyes. _Alphas._ Impossible.

“We’ve sized it up,” the tailor says. “Your… predecessor… was almost the same size as you. This fits like a glove.”

Jim grins, letting too much teeth show. “You mean the bitch I murdered so I could take his place.”

The tailor’s known Jim for too long for it to be that easy to rile him up. “Of course, sir,” he replies politely, with a little incline of the head. “Will there be anything else?”

The tailor’s servile attitude comes off as disingenuous, but that’s just because he’s an alpha; Jim knows for a _fact_ that they physically can’t be sincere and submissive at the same time. It’s worth the sass, though. Putting the meatheads in their place. “Yes, that’ll be all,” Jim says. “Send the car around, will you?”

The tailor bows. “Right away, sir.” He leaves the room without questions. Jim still has a grin on his face when he throws himself down on the couch and instantly wrinkles up the priceless wedding dress. He currently has three hundred sixty-two alphas on staff, and every single one of them is a _joy._ He can see how it rankles them; an unbound omega, right under their nose and completely untouchable. Every time Jim gives one of his alphas an order, he can see every single hair on the back of their neck prickle up at the sheer _wrongness_ of it. Omegas don’t command. They don’t _order._

They certainly don’t run international criminal empires.

Jim grins to himself. He always was a rule-breaker. He stretches, lounging himself out on the couch with his arms and legs sprawled over as much space as humanly possible. Today is a good day. Sunny – warm – just this side of spring, with a little crisp on the air and birds singing their cheerful little lungs out.

And Jim’s getting _married._

He can’t help it. He’s _giddy._ He doesn’t know what the best part is; that nobody knows what the omega bride is _supposed_ to look like, (because of some asinine taboo banning omegas in public) or that tonight Jim gets to _personally_ assassinate the King.

Sebastian Moran the First – (and last) – his greatness the Lord High King and Alpha of jolly old England. Jim doesn’t know whether to laugh or vomit. It’s been impossibly easy. If one person – just _one –_ had suspected omegas could think for themselves, Jim wouldn’t have been able to do a thing. Jim twists enough on the couch to see himself in the full-length mirror, and practices batting his eyelashes. He does an alright dumb and pretty, he tells himself – especially with a touch of black at his eyelids and a bit of red on his lips. He could almost pass for a court doll.

 _So who was Richard Brook?_ Jim asks himself. _How would he act? Would he be excited?_ He probes the character in his head, trying to poke it into a cohesive form. _Would he cry?_

Definitely tears, Jim decides, but not happy ones. If he’s honest with himself, Jim can admit that Richard – that any sane omega – would be afraid. Sebastian Moran is neither a public man nor a merciful one. The recent wars he’s been fighting with France over territory in Brittony and Normandy are proof enough of that. Sebastian is single-minded, ruthless, and strong beyond all hope of surrender. A real _alpha’s alpha,_ as Jim’s dad would say. To tell the truth, Jim finds Sebastian a little bit _sexy_ in his mock-uniform _:_ The rest of the kingdom shakes their heads and says things like – _well, that’s the royal line for you._

Now that he’s so close to the wedding, Jim’s sort of regretting going with weepy little Richard Brook as his cover character. _I could have had more fun with this,_ he thinks, frowning, and curls a bit of his hair around his finger until the nail goes purple. _A little society slut might have been fun –_ Jim grins even wider at the thought, even though his face is starting to hurt. _Can you imagine? **Me.** On my knees. **Please, Your Majesty, put your fucking knot in me –**_

And _that_ makes Jim laugh out loud, rolling over on the sofa and clutching his stomach. _Oh, god,_ he thinks, gasping for breath. _I’m going to have so much fun. I’m going to cut off his cock and make him choke on it._

An alpha’s an alpha, after all. And if there’s anything Jim loves, it’s putting them in their place.

***

The day of the wedding dawns clear and bright and perfect, which half the nation takes as a good omen and the other half swears foretells another ten years of war. Jim can’t be bothered to think about it. He’s too busy memorising the steps to the little dance he and the king have to go through together – step, bow, step. Turn. Bow to the priest –

It’s endless. To make everything a little more frustrating, Jim can only get the barest glimpses of his groom-to-be; even for someone like him, it’s not much to go on. He doesn’t have much to deduce from but a few side-eyed glimpses when no one else seems to be looking. The rules are strict. Jim’s to stare straight ahead – keep the veil over his face – offer a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ when spoken to be the priest.

At least the wedding itself is gorgeous.

They’ve chosen what looks like the most ostentatious church in England for the ceremony, a high-ceilinged place rimmed with giant stained-glass windows. Over the alter Joan of Arc, the omega hero, is picked out in red and orange glass like flames. The firey light from her window dances over the high beams of the ceiling, tinting the endless falls of white lace and silk that dress the church. There are strands of real jewels in the decorations; onyx, for Jim’s hair and eyes, and gold – which Jim assumes is for Sebastian.

 _Sebastian_.

Jim couldn’t have picked a better alpha to assassinate if he’d _tried._

Sebastian rumbles out the wedding ceremony in a deep voice that sounds like moss-covered rocks feel. Velvet-and-warm, with something dangerously hard and sharp beneath it.

In another life, Jim would have hired the man as a stunt cock. Sebastian is huge – almost overwhelming, broad of shoulder and tall enough to tower over the beta priest. He’s got the kind of muscle that most men dream about at night. His waist is long, slender, his tuxedo cut to reveal the lithe curve of his hip. What glances Jim does get out of the corners of his eyes are absolutely _tantalizing._

And the smell – if Jim could bottle up and sell the smell of Sebastian, he’d make a mint in an hour. Half the omegas in the place must be wet. Sebastian smells so good it makes Jim’s thoughts go a little bit dizzy whenever he brushes too close. When he reaches out to put the ring on Jim’s finger, something huge and hungry stirs in Jim’s stomach.

Jim finds it difficult to remember that this man is going to be dead in twelve hours – with Jim’s knife through his guts, if Jim’s lucky. But then, Jim’s still half-and-half on whether he’ll kill Sebastian before or _after_ he consummates the marriage. _I could be technically king of England. Might be worth a laugh._

He hardly has time to roll that thought over in his head when – suddenly – Sebastian is lifting up his veil.

Jim blinks, the light of the church unexpectedly dazzling without the white fog of the veil in his way. His eyes take a moment to adjust. At first, the only impression he has of Sebastian is gold; blonde hair, tanned skin, citrus stones shimmering at his collar and wrists. Sebastian looks like he was made out of a sunbeam. And yet…

Jim isn’t sure quite what he expected. Whatever it was, it’s not what he’s seeing. Sebastian might once have been handsome, in a generic way; but not anymore. Two broad lines of scar tissue jaggedly cross his face, bisecting his nose and his eye in waxy white strips. His eyes are the kind of electric blue most people have to wear contacts for, but they’re too deep-set and narrow for classical beauty. There’s an unfriendly scowl around the corners of his mouth, and his brows are set just a little too close for politeness. Jim’s brain supplies a hundred more details, most of them irrelevant ( _impatient, short-tempered, gun connoisseur, chef_ ) some of them interesting ( _poet, big game hunter, adrenaline junkie, criminal_ ) and at least one of them life-changing ( _killer)_.

“Oh,” Jim says, but it’s all he has time for, because Sebastian isn’t waiting. Jim’s barely breathed the word before one of Sebastian’s massive hands curls around his jaw, pushing his head up. Jim lets Sebastian guide him, relishing the rough scrape of Sebastian’s callouses over the sensitive skin of his throat. _It’s good, isn’t it?_

_What I could do with him –_

Jim has a reeling sense of what it would be like to have this man, this killer-king, leashed on his feet. Then he inhales, and catches the full force of Sebastian’s scent. Sebastian smells like heaven – like every sin at once – like fireworks in Jim’s brain. He leans in, until his breath is gusting warm and soft on Jim’s lips. Then Sebastian whispers – just for the two of them – “Yes?”

Jim wants to laugh, or maybe he wants to cry. He doesn’t know. He can’t think. For the first time in his life he can feel his genetics overpowering him, the omega impulse to mate blindsiding his rational thought. With Sebastian this close Jim can already feel slick starting to drip between his legs, blood slowly pooling in his cock.

 _Jesus –_ It feels like a heat, just from the touch of Sebastian’s hand on Jim’s jaw. “Yes,” Jim gasps, unable to get enough air. He can’t seem to think.

Not that he needs to. The moment Sebastian’s lips seal over his, Jim’s body responds on instinct. He doesn’t know he’s pushing forwards until he’s pressed tight to Sebastian, grinding himself wantonly against Sebastian’s thigh. He’d be embarrassed, only Sebastian doesn’t seem to have much more self-control. Sebastian growls once, deep in his throat, a rumbling sound like boulders shifting on the edge of an avalanche. Then his arms wrap around Jim and he lifts him – _lifts him_ – off the floor and into the most devastating kiss Jim has ever experienced.

It’s a little like being lit on fire. Sebastian bites and licks and fucks his way into Jim’s mouth ruthlessly, and Jim can’t do anything more than moan and claw at the shoulders of Sebastian’s stiff wedding suit. He can’t seem to breathe right. The collar of the bridal gown was unbearable this morning; now it’s actually choking. Jim knows there’s more in his brain than animal impulse, but he couldn’t find it if he tried.

Dimly, somewhere, he hears the chapel begin to empty.

 _Common,_ some small untouched corner of his brain supplies, _during alpha-omega arranged marriages – if the pheromone match is strong, sometimes the alpha can’t resist claiming the omega immediately –_

 ** _Here?!_** Another part of Jim’s brain asks in alarm, _on the alter?_

And then the third, and loudest voice – _Here, oh, yes, god, **here, now.**_

When Sebastian throws him down onto the alter Jim, without another thought, reaches up to pull him in.

***

Afterwards, Jim rests his head on Sebastian’s chest and allows them both a moment of peace. Sebastian’s breath slows, heartbeat dropping into a steady beat under Jim’s ear. It’s sort of endearing, after all – this alpha thing.

Not endearing enough for Jim to _submit_ to him, of course, but…

Jim shuts his eyes. He supposes he could keep _one_ stunt-cock on staff. And Sebastian – ( _poet-chef-killer-criminal_ ) – Sebastian has a lot of promise. Jim yawns, stretching out as best he can and settling himself down comfortably on Sebastian’s wide chest. _He’ll have to be on a leash, of course,_ Jim thinks drowsily, and chuckles.

“Mmm?” Sebastian rumbles beneath him.

Jim smiles and shuts his eyes. “Tell you in the morning, soldier-boy,” he says, and tries not to look forward to that too much.


	6. Old West

 

“Aw, save it.” Sebastian takes another drag of his cigarette and leans forward to tap the ashes into the plate on the table. “You think they’d have me here keeping watch on you if they thought I couldn’t handle it?”

There’s a short silence, then Jim tilts his head to the side in that snake-like way of his and says, “I think they don’t know the first thing about you and I.”

Sebastian gives him a sharp look but Jim’s already moving, padding bare-foot back across his cell to the window. He can see a bit of stars, there, the moon if he’s lucky. They thought it was a kindness. It’s Jim’s last night on earth, no matter what the bleeding hearts in town are saying about his age. Jim is seventeen, evil as a rattler and twice as deadly. He’s knocked over six banks already, two a year since he turned fourteen, and never even came close to looking like he was going to get caught.

Not until Sebastian stepped up, anyways. Unfair advantage; he _knew_ Jim, and Jim was never going to shoot to kill with him. Sebastian can still remember Jim when Jim was a child – _more_ of a child than he is now – a scrawny little thing, all elbows and knees and those dark, malevolent eyes.

They’d raised each other, more or less, after Sebastian found Jim in a ditch outside Old Reilley’s farm. Then Sebastian had turned eighteen, and it’d been either the sheriff’s office or taking over his father’s farm, and he’d left Jim alone.

Four years ago. Jim hadn’t even waited a year to knock over his first bank.

Ash drops from Sebastian’s cigarette onto the polished wood of the desk and he curses, scrambling forward to rub it out before it can stain or burn the wood.

“You ever think about coming with me?” Jim asks. When Sebastian looks up Jim is peeled onto the back wall of the cell, shoulders hard against the rough wood and his face so far back in shadow his features look black.

Sebastian thinks about lying, but it isn’t worth it. “Yeah,” he says, with a shrug of his shoulders. “Few times. Wish I’d been there when you decided to go.”

“Would you have stopped me?” Jim sounds mocking.

Sebastian considers it, for a moment. “No,” he says, finally, “I think I’d have helped you.”

One of the oil-lamps on the side of the jailhouse pops, an imperfection in the fat making the candle flare. It’s a nowhere little frontier town, not big enough for electric lights. Sebastian doesn’t mind, though; the lamplight is soft, licking along the wooden boards and turning them to caramel. It makes the shadows seem deeper, velvety, the night-sky outside like a broad swathe of silk and diamonds. Outside the jail-house’s small circle of light, there’s darkness for miles around. Everyone else is sleeping. They might as well be alone in the world.

“You should have,” Jim murmurs, after a moment. He doesn’t move from where he’s standing, face hidden in the shadows. “I’d have liked that. Just you and me.”

Sebastian sighs. “They’re going to hang you tomorrow, Jim,” he repeats. He’s not really sure what he means by it. _Why’d you do this? Couldn’t you have stayed? I woulda come home for you, no matter what. You coulda waited –_

“They’d hang both of us, if they knew what we were.”

That makes Sebastian look up sharply, and this time he catches the glint of Jim’s eyes – bright as candle-flames in the darkness. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sebastian asks, guardedly. He can see the vague outline of a bitter smile start to twist at Jim’s features.

“Sebastian,” Jim chides. “Good people like this, they can’t abide sodomy in their God-fearing little town.”

It wins him a flinch, but Sebastian came to terms long ago with what he is. He takes another drag of the cigarette, and leans back in the chair. “That’s got nothing to do with this.”

“Got to do with why you’ll be _weeping,_ when they hang me.”

Sebastian grits his teeth. “Just because we messed around as kids – “

All of a sudden, Jim’s at the bars. He moves so fast he seems to blur, slamming himself forward and catching his palms with a slap against the hard iron. That’s how he took the banks, Sebastian knows; that scary, inhuman speed. When Jim wants to he moves like a striking snake, like lightning across the sky.

“We didn’t _mess around,_ ” Jim hisses, his features contorted and ugly with rage. “You _know_ what we were – “

Sebastian feels his lip starts to twitch, drawing into a sneer, and fights it. He forces himself to take another drag of the cigarette, slow and even. He blows the smoke to the ceiling, watches the white clouds gather and billow against the cobwebs in the rafters. Jim’s still snarling mad, and Sebastian gets it – if it was Jim, if Jim had said _messed around,_ Seb’d have the same reaction.

 _You’re my whole soul, you know that,_ he’d told Jim, saddling his horse for his first day sheriff’s office. _And I’ll come back, I swear. There’s gotta be somewhere we could live. Out California way, maybe, I hear there’s places you can go without seeing another man for years –_

But in the end, the railroad had pushed onwards, westwards, and the places to run had gotten smaller and smaller.

“And what was I supposed to do with that?” Sebastian asks Jim, not looking down from the ceiling. “Get us both killed? If you could have pretended – gotten yourself a wife, maybe – “

“I had a _wife,_ ” Jim spits venomously, “So did _you._ ”

“A husband’s not a wife,” Sebastian shoots back. He risks a glance over at Jim and immediately wishes he hadn’t. The rest of the county might believe that Jimmy-the-Kid is a psychopath, the devil born in human skin, but Sebastian knows him well enough to know when he’s hurting. And this – this is Jim’s soul, laid open. Sebastian sighs, and shuts his eyes. “What was I supposed to do, Jim?” he asks. Rhetorical question. There was nothing he _could_ do, and now they’re going to hang Jim in the morning. Beautiful, unpredictable, irreplaceable Jim.

“Come with me,” Jim whispers.

As if it had been as simple as that.

***

In the morning the deputies come for him – six of them, three on each side, which Sebastian thinks is a compliment. They’re all men grown, veterans of years of hard service for the law. Between them, Jim seems even more fragile and slender than usual. His face is pale, the black mass of his hair perched uncertainly on top like it’s about to fall off. The bones of his wrists in the irons are so small he looks like he could slip his hands through.

They push him too fast, making him stumble against the chains on his ankles, then jeer him for falling.

Sebastian’s stomach is roiling. Fury and frustration and pure, helpless guilt eat at him from the inside out like acid. He walks behind the deputies, choking on the dust of the road when their boots kick it up. He can glimpse Jim like a shadow between them; stumbling, falling, being kicked back up to his feet.

At least it’s a short walk. In front of them, an impromptu scaffolding has been risen for the occasion. A single noose hangs ominously from the crossbeam, dangling in front of the rising sun. There’s a rooster crowing, off in the distance, which Sebastian supposes counts for dramatic effect. Jim’d like that. Jim always liked the drama in things.

It’s too early for there to be a crowd to push through, but there’s a fair few citizens standing around to watch despite the hour. Jim’d earned that. He’d left a bloody swathe behind him, clearing out those banks. People have died. Good men, who did nothing wrong but get in Jim’s way.

Sebastian’s stomach is still aching. He fingers the revolver at his hip, but it doesn’t bring him any comfort.

They’re walking Jim up to the scaffolding, now. Sebastian can hear each step as Jim mounts the rickety wooden stairs, the worn heels of his boots scuffing against the planks. The priest is reading – some blessing, or another, which won’t take on Jim.

As soon as the good Lord made Jim, he took his hands off and said, _This one isn’t mine._

Sebastian gets his first clear look at Jim’s face when Jim turns around for the noose. He’s not sure what he’s expecting; defiance, maybe. That cruel mocking self-awareness that Jim is so fond of. Maybe, at the worst, Jim would be vicious; he’d single Sebastian out and scream his crimes at the last moment, so they’d hang the two of them together.

_Maybe that would be the **best** outcome._

But Jim isn’t any of these things. His face is blank, utterly expressionless, as cold and flawless as the cast of a mask. His hair sweeps across his face, teased by the wind into black ribbons. His strong Irish jaw is set, muscles tense and grinding, and his eyes –

His eyes seek Sebastian like there isn’t another man in town. Jim stares down at Sebastian as they put the noose around his neck, and there isn’t anything as obvious as betrayal there; Jim’s expression is _hungry,_ greedy, as if he’s desperate to devour every last chance he gets to look at Sebastian.

Something in Seb’s chest lurches and swings dizzily around, leaving his stomach hollow and aching. He wishes he was brave enough to throw himself up onto the scaffolding, cut the noose down and fold Jim’s slender frame in his arms.

 _You know I never stopped loving you,_ he wants to tell Jim, _you know I would have done anything, **anything,** to be with you._

He tries to tell Jim with his eyes. They’re connected there, as the priest finishes reading the last rights; gazes locked across the dusty square. If Sebastian could concentrate, maybe, he could forget that there was anyone else in the world. It could be just him and Jim, like it used to be. He could run up there and fetch Jim down, fold him up so nobody – _nobody –_ would ever dare to touch Jim Moriarty again –

“…Sentenced to hang by the neck until dead,” someone is saying, distant and unimportant. “Do you have any final words?”

“ _Sebastian,”_ Jim whispers. It’s too far away for Seb to hear his voice, but he can read it in Jim’s lips, see the shape of them as they form Sebastian’s name.

The ache in his chest is deepening, swelling, and Sebastian thinks when Jim dies he’ll go hollow completely; there’ll be nothing left in him except a poisonous darkness, until he dies.

The executioner reaches forward, for the lever.

Jim shuts his eyes.

***

If Sebastian wasn’t the best shot in three counties, it might have been a tragedy.

But he is – he’s the best shot the nation’s ever seen, and for Sebastian it’s child’s play to quick draw a revolver and shoot a rope at twenty feet. The executioner puts his hand on the lever, and it’s too late to stop it; too late to stop the gate at Jim’s feet opening, too late to stop his sudden plunge downwards.

But the crack of the gun rings out like the wrath of god, and the rope snaps, and before anyone else can react Sebastian is there. He slides in the dirt to Jim, kicking up a cloud of dust that envelops the scaffold.

He snatches Jim up into his arms. Jim’s coughing – choking out road dust and bruises on his throat – and blissfully, blissfully, alive.

They make it to Sebastian’s horse in a haze of gunfire, lead still stinging at their heels as they high-tail it out of town. Jim doesn’t say a word the whole time. He lets Sebastian do the work. All he seems able to do is to cling to Sebastian’s chest, wrapping his fingers tight in the fabric of Sebastian’s shirt like he’s making doubly sure that Seb’s real.

It’s not until three miles out of town that he finally gets a word in; cradled up on the pommel of Sebastian’s horse, Jim runs his fingers under Sebastian’s chin and says, “There _really_ won’t be any place to hide now. You’re stuck with me, darling. It’s a shoot-on-sight-situation.”

Sebastian glances down, but Jim’s face is hidden. “Thought that’s what you wanted.”

The hair rustles Jim’s hair back and forth, blowing the fine strands up against Sebastian’s lips. Somehow, Seb gets the impression Jim’s smiling.

“You know,” Jim says, “I think I may be able to live with it.”


	7. Psychiatrist-Patient

When Jim enters the room, Sebastian Moran stands up. It’s an odd, archaic bit of politeness, and Jim finds himself taken aback. He switches his clipboard to his other hand, and extends the right for Sebastian to shake.

“Hello,” Jim says, giving his voice a fake-nervous lilt to put Sebastian off guard. “You must be Mr. Moran?”

The heavy chains on Moran’s wrists clink as he reaches up to shake. At the door, his personal security guard shifts restlessly, as if he expects Sebastian to leap for Jim’s throat.

“Yes.” Moran has a pleasant voice – deep and round on the vowels, like his chest is a hollow drum with space for words to vibrate. “And you’re Dr. Moriarty.” His handshake is firm, but not crushing – obviously he doesn’t feel the need to show off.

Come to think of it, neither would Jim, if their positions were reversed. Moran is a big, hulking man, but Jim knows from the news footage just how fast he can move when he needs to. When he agreed to be Moran’s personal therapist, the cops showed him more – the tapes from the warehouse where Moran’s last six murders had taken place.

Jim thought they were doctored, at first. Apparently, footage of Moran has that effect on people.

“Call me Jim,” he tells Moran, “Please.” He gestures at the two comfortable chairs in the room, leather squished tight and strained with padding. “Have a seat. What brings you here?”

Moran raises one eyebrow as he folds himself gracefully down into one of the chairs, liquid and elegant as a cat. “I’m sure you know,” he chides Jim, and Jim gives him an answering smile.

Of _course_ Jim knows. There isn’t a waking person in the modern world who doesn’t _know._

 _The Beast of Belfast,_ they’re calling him in the papers, and the coverage has been non-stop for months. When the story finally broke that the Beast was Sebastian Moran, son of Britain’s favorite peer, Jim thought the press might call a national holiday. It was too perfect – like something out of a movie. Moran himself doesn’t help with that. He’s tall, blonde, and preternaturally handsome in a sharkish sort of way. The scar on Moran’s lip – a souvenir from Afghanistan – twists his expression and gives him a permanent air of wry amusement, as if he’s in on a joke that no one else has heard.

Hollywood couldn’t have cast a better killer.

Jim settles into the chair across from Moran, and opens his clipboard. There’s a blank sheet of paper inside, and a pen – nothing else, not for Moran. They’d tried all the usual tests in prison, with varying degrees of hilarity. He tested positive for every single disorder they could question for, and never once looked like failing a lie detector test. Even when he said he was a fourteen foot tall purple lizard.

Jim glances up and sees Moran is watching him with those pale eyes like chips of ice. There’s a curious tension to the air; Moran is judging him, Jim knows. Weighing his worth, silently, trying to guess the best way to toy with him.

Jim thinks, improbably, of tigers – even though tigers don’t have eyes that particular shade of electric blue.

He sighs, and puts his clipboard aside. “We both know you could lie to me,” he starts, by way of an opening, folding his hands in his lap. “You’ve obviously talked your way around every standard test without breaking a sweat.”

Moran inclines his head, just a hair, and Jim takes it as a sign to continue.

“I’ve seen the results they’ve sent me and I’d be surprised if there’s a true word in the entire report.” He gestures, and notices that Moran’s eyes follow his hands. Jim is _loving_ this; it’s a little like being a butterfly pinned for dissection. Moran’s sheer presence is palpable, like a weight on the air. Jim’s never met anyone like him – never met anyone quite so deadly, quite so sharp and limitless in their potential to do harm.

No one, of course, apart from himself. Jim smiles blandly, and continues, “I hope you’ll tell me the truth because it’s worth telling, and worth listening to. But if all you’re here to tell is lies, we can spend the time in silence instead. I don’t mind that.”

Moran’s eyes narrow. “You don’t want me to talk?”

Jim spreads his hands wide, opening up his chest in a gesture of frankness. He has the disturbing feeling that it exposes him, spreads him wide open for Moran’s blade.

Jim still has dreams about that, the way Moran had tossed his knife up and caught it to switch his grip, spinning lightly on the balls of his feet like dancing, blood spattered over his cheekbone –

“I don’t want you to lie,” Jim interrupts his own thought, “I know your father has insisted on a… psychiatric solution to your difficulties. I think both of us know how likely I am to ‘fix’ you.”

Moran grins appreciatively at that. He has a wide smile – a little bit too wide to be friendly. “Nothing personal.”

Jim smiles back, trying to hide the corner of his mind that whispers, _I could if I wanted to, but I like you like this._ “I didn’t think it was. You’re far too smart to be ‘cured’ against your will, Mr. Moran. What I’m offering instead is simply whatever you _do_ want. Because of my arrangement with your father, nothing you say to me – under any circumstances – is admissible in a court of law.”

“Sebastian,” Moran says, absently. He runs a thumb over his bottom lip as he mulls Jim’s offer over, staring over Jim’s shoulder with a thoughtful expression.

Jim would give several small fortunes to know what he’s thinking.

Finally, Sebastian drops his hand back to his lap and fixes Jim with that heavy, overly-intense stare. “You watched the footage, I assume.” Jim nods. Sebastian’s lip twitches upwards, jerking the frozen tissue of his scar. “What did you think?”

It’s a test, and an obvious one. Jim licks his lips. The invitation, of course, is to over-think. To over-sympathize, and prove that he’s nothing but a sycophant. _If you knew what I really thought, Sebastian, we’d end up in a pissing match –_ “You’re very talented,” he hears himself start, before he’s made up his mind what he’s going to say at all. “Most serial killers are sloppy or at the very least focused on things other than the efficiency of their actual killings.” Jim sees the surprise in Sebastian’s slow blink, although he’s not sure anyone else would have caught it. “I think you didn’t receive sexual gratification from it – or at least, not from killing on its own.” That’s been a popular theory, but the idea of Sebastian Moran with one hand on a gun and the other stuck down his pants is a little bit ridiculous. Surely no one who’s met Moran, with his razor-sharp focus and calculating, mechanical mind, could believe it. “I think you aimed for efficiency – for perfection. I think you killed those people to prove you were the best at it, that you were flawless.” Jim folds his hands in his lap, and takes a gamble. “And I think you succeeded. More or less.”

Sebastian raises an eyebrow – the ruined one, bisected by a thick line of scar tissue. “More or less?”

“You got caught, didn’t you?”

There’s a beat, and then Sebastian laughs: throwing his head back to bare his throat, unself-conscious and carefree. His laugh is as deep as his voice, and just as oddly pleasant. It seems like too human a sound to be coming from him. At the door, his prison guard shifts.

When he’s done laughing Sebastian leans back in his chair, the chains at his wrists ringing softly against themselves. “Well,” he says, after a moment, his voice sparking with amusement and interest, “Go on, then, Jim. Ask me what you want to know.”

Jim smiles, opens his clipboard, and sets his pen to the page. “Tell me how you started killing,” he says.

Sebastian smiles.


	8. Prison

The prison buzzer screams so loud it almost drowns out the harsh metal-on-metal screech of the cell doors opening.

Sebastian heaves himself upright and limps blearily forward into the line, still half-asleep. The cell block blinks into focus slowly around him – grey concrete, white cloudy sky, the orange-and-blue paint marking out the ward numbers. Some days Sebastian wishes he was back in London just for the colours; the shining black of Jim’s hair, the elegant cream-and-gold of Conduit Street, the startling crimson splatter of a killshot.

 _Even if I went back to London,_ Sebastian tells himself, _I’d only get two out of three –_

He steps forward in time with the other men on his block, shambling left-right-left to the cafeteria. Then it’s roll-call. Then free time, a whole half-hour in which Sebastian can sit in the yard and do nothing. Then it’s back to his cell, to do nothing. At first Sebastian thought the monotony would drive him insane. He thought he’d never survive in a cage; like a shark with its fins snipped off, unable to move and drowning.

He knows better, now.

As they march two-by-two through the double-doors of the cafeteria, Sebastian keeps his head down. He doesn’t make eye contact, or trouble. A few of them have sought him out already – looking to test themselves with the man or the legend.

 _The Great Sebastian Moran,_ Seb sneers to himself, _Jim Moriarty’s right hand man, the Crown Prince of Crime, the Second Most Deadly Man in London._

It’d all been a great big joke, of course. But he can’t blame them for not seeing that. Sebastian picks up a tray when it’s his turn in line and slides it down the conveyer. Left. Right. Left. _Wonder if it’s meatball surprise or spaghetti._ Left –

Someone steps in front of Sebastian, budging in to get the last piece of garlic bread, and Seb doesn’t even think twice. He plants his foot a little bit forward, drops his weight low and hits them coming up with his shoulder. The budger – a latino man with a day of the dead tattoo on his hands and _Michael_ stitched on his uniform – goes stumbling backwards. Sebastian never stops moving. He uses the momentum of standing to throw a punch, moving liquidly through the sequence like it comes as easily as breathing.

Sebastian hits Michael with three knuckles in the right side of the jaw, and lifts him about a foot off the ground. Michael goes flying. He’s unconscious before he hits the floor and skids, satisfyingly, into the eating area.

Sebastian barely has time to be pleased before a hand slams down on his shoulder. “Shouldn’t’ve done that, son,” one of the guards drawls. Sebastian debates restraint for about a third of a second before the guard follows Michael – crashing to the concrete floor of the dining hall in a clatter and bang of equipment.

There’s a dead, eerie silence surrounding him, now. Sebastian leans back against the lukewarm metal of the cafeteria line, and waits. He can hear other guards already pushing through the crowd towards him, drawing tazers and stun batons from their belts. One of the other prisoner’s gone for the guard on the floor with what looks like a shiv, face twisted up by hate and bitter revenge.

Sebastian can remember feeling like that. He remembers how anger and hate and vindictive pride used to burn in him. He’d done a lot of stupid shit because he felt he _had_ to, because some passion or another was eating him up from the inside.

 _Jim’s dead, now, though,_ Sebastian thinks. _So. You know._

He doesn’t manage to finish the thought before the guards are on him.

***

Time passes slowly in solitary, but then, time passes slowly for Sebastian everywhere. He’s sort of glad, in the end, that they took away any methods he had of killing himself. Sebastian doesn’t believe in hell, so it’s nice to know that he’s getting punished in the here-and-now for letting Jim die. _They_ don’t think of it that way, of course.

But Sebastian likes to.

Three years, two months, six days since Jim died. Give or take. Sebastian hasn’t got a calendar in here. Sometimes he wonders what it would have been like if he’d forced Sherlock Holmes to shoot him. _Sebastian Moran,_ he thinks, should have fallen with Jim’s Empire. The last of Jim’s possessions to be destroyed. It would have made sense. Instead, he’s got some messed up demon on his shoulder, keeping him alive, so here he is.

Solitary. Again.

Sebastian sighs, and shifts to a minutely more comfortable position on the rock-hard prison cot.

***

 _Jim is furious, and it’s his last night alive but Sebastian doesn’t know that. He wants to watch_ Keeping Up With The Kardashians; _but he only wants that because it pisses Sebastian off so Sebastian doesn’t let him._

_And it’s his last night alive, but Sebastian doesn’t know that._

_Jim screwed with the lock of the gun-cage again, so Sebastian can’t get in and clean the 1911, and it’s his last night alive._

_Sebastian is screaming at him. And Jim is howling back, throwing things, scuffing his shoes kicking at the walls. And he goes for a knife, but Sebastian is faster and he won’t let Jim have it._

_And Jim snarls, “If it were easier, **Moran,** I’d just kill you now,” and Sebastian is so angry that it burns the inside of his throat like smoke._

_And he says, “Try it, you prick,” he says, “ **Fuck** you,” because he doesn’t know._

_He doesn’t know._

***

Sebastian wakes up curled around his stomach, like he’s cradling an injury. He stares at his knees in the darkness, knowing somehow that it’s hours before dawn. The prison isn’t silent; the prison is never silent. Five hundred men packed into a small space make noise, even when they’re sleeping. There’s a snore from two rows up. Someone is pacing, footsteps squeaking on the concrete. One of the guards is walking his beat, neat heels clicking louder than the soft sound of prisoner’s shoes.

Sebastian’s mouth tastes of sleep like something died there, and no matter how hard he stares in the blackness, he can’t see anything.

 _I didn’t know,_ he tells himself, but there it is anyways. _Fuck you, you little prick._

Sebastian tells himself that he wouldn’t have done it differently, if he’d known, but that’s a lie. He probably would have begged. Probably would have splayed himself out on the ground and told Jim _anything, I’ll do anything, just don’t leave like this._

Jim would have laughed.

Jim would have died anyways.

***

In the morning his pain is less immediate. There are things to do, after all; Cafeteria. Roll-call. Free time. Sebastian sinks underneath a haze of grief like still water, deep and fathomless. Sometimes Seb wonders if he’ll hit the bottom of it; if there is a bottom. If there’s a place, somewhere down inside him, where he simply can’t miss Jim anymore.

 _Like going in to shock,_ Sebastian thinks dimly. The hard plastic of his cafeteria tray is cool in his hands. He takes a step forward. Right. Left. _Smells like meatballs today._ And that calls up the image – clear and vivid and vibrant in his head, Jim’s brains spattering backwards through the rifle scope. The way his head had jerked, like it was attached to a string someone was tugging sharply. And then he’d collapsed, all knobbly bones and sharp edges with nothing left to hold them up anymore –

_Left. Right._

Sebastian can’t see the floor in front of him. He supposes it hurts, thinking about Jim. He supposes there’s still a part of him that’s screaming, endless and horrified. He can hear it in the corner of his mind whenever he thinks too hard – that terrible grief that he’s still drowning in.

But he doesn’t have to feel it. He doesn’t have to feel anything, if he focuses on counting the footsteps. On roll-call. Cafeteria. Free time –

“Moran, 23904. Moran, 23904. To the visiting area.” The loudspeaker is tinny, but the words are clear. In another lifetime – as another man – Sebastian would have been curious, sharply interested in the change of routine.

But that’s a whole lot of energy, so he doesn’t bother. Without curiosity, he leaves his tray on the cafeteria bar and steps out of line. Six guards step with him – a compliment, he assumes, seeing as he’s unarmed and chained hand and foot. But then, the first week here he’d killed –

By the time Sebastian finishes the thought they’re out of line and halfway down the hallway to the visiting hall, and he doesn’t remember where the time has gone. Nothing seems to have changed; same grey corridors. Same click-click of footsteps. Same rattle of chain with every movement he makes, a subtle and soft reminder that he’s going to die here.

They sit Sebastian down in a black plastic chair that he could probably rip apart with his bare hands and chain him, wrist-to-wrist, ankle-to-floor. He lets them – thinks, _I could kill them all if I tried –_ but he doesn’t try, and they leave him like that.

Sebastian leans back in the chair, way back, until it creaks against his weight, and stares at the ceiling. _Three years, two months, seven days,_ he thinks. _Tomorrow it will be eight. And then nine. And one day it will be four years – ten years – twenty._

Sometimes the weight of it seems like it’s pressing on Sebastian’s lungs, choking him from the inside out. He feels like screaming, thinking about it, but fights the impulse down and lets himself sink again. Under the surface of his grief, to the dull grey place underneath where it’s so far past bearable that he feels nothing.

The door opens, and shuts.

“Sebastian,” someone says. An impossible someone. Someone with a deep, soft irish purr – someone who is taking more care with their words than usual – someone who is trying hard, so hard, to be gentle. “Sebastian,” they say. “I am sorry.”

They sound like they mean it.

Sebastian looks down from the ceiling. There’s a man, in front of him. Dark suit. Dark hair. Big eyes, black and glittering, like the eyes of a crow. _It could almost be –_

 _Don’t think it,_ Sebastian tells himself. _Jim's dead._

“Do you hear me?” The man in the suit asks. “Sebastian, it’s me. _Sebastian._ ”

Sebastian lets his eyes drift over the man’s shoulder, and stares at the wall. Grey concrete. Black hair.

Sometimes he misses London just for the colours; cream and gold fittings in Conduit street. Gleaming silver on the barrel of the 1911. Jim’s tongue, pink and slick as he licks his lips.

“Sebastian. It’s me. Can you hear me?”


	9. Magical Realism

Moriarty turns his palm upside down, slow and graceful, and the blood runs over his bone-white skin. “I am a thousand years old,” he tells Sebastian, calmly. “Too old to be caught by bread and honey.” He kicks the edge of the circle and Sebastian’s hastily-drawn chalk smudges out. “Were you really trying? This is a little bit _sad._ ”

The heel of a loaf of bakery-fresh bread crumbles underneath his shining black shoes. No preservatives. Sebastian’d been particular about that when he was picking it out, asked the baker twice to be sure.

The faerie’s still waiting for an answer. Sebastian licks his lips. “Don’t suppose you’d tell me what the Unseelie Court is doing in London,” he tries.

Moriarty laughs. Like the rest of his kind, he’s preternaturally beautiful – dark eyes, shining black hair, flawless white skin that’s so thin it’s almost translucent. He looks like he was spun from glass and shadows. “No.” His voice is warm with fond amusement, although that could be his glamour. When he smiles, his teeth are sharply pointed. “Who taught you to catch the _sidhe_?”

“My Da. Is your Queen with you?”

“Maybe. Did he tell you what to do if circles don’t work?”

Sebastian hesitates. Moriarty’s smile deepens, going a little bit wicked. “Don’t tell me it’s your first time.” His voice curves around the words, deep and thrumming with promise.

Sebastian feels a lurch of desire, heavy and urgent, start in his stomach. He fights it down, knowing it didn’t really come from inside him. “Everyone’s got to start somewhere.”

Moriarty’s still smiling – a good sign, Sebastian hopes, but it’s impossible to tell. There’s something subtly off about Moriarty, like whatever he looks like under his skin keeps threatening to break through. On the surface he’s innocuous enough, except for that otherworldly beauty – big eyes, wide smile, narrow chin and a little bit of stubble from yesterday’s missed shave. Moriarty could be a hundred men in London.

He could be human.

Sebastian’s brain keeps slipping away from the moment when Moriarty appeared in the alley-way; between one breath in the next, as if he’d stepped through an invisible doorway. The memory is like water; whenever Sebastian tries to call it up, he finds himself thinking about something else.

Seb has the disturbing impression that tomorrow he won’t be able to remember the conversation at all.

The light at the end of the alley flickers as Moriarty tilts his head to the side, watching Sebastian with a curiosity so intense that it almost has physical weight. “Your first time calling a _sidhe,_ ” he wonders aloud, eyes never leaving Sebastian’s. “And you decide to start with a Lord. An _Unseelie_ Lord, as you call it. Your pronunciation’s awful, by the way. It shouldn’t be; your blood tastes Irish. What happened to the family heritage?”

Sebastian shrugs one shoulder. “The Kildares lost,” he tells Moriarty, an old family joke.

Moriarty’s grin gets wider. “I remember.”

Then there’s a short silence, because fucked if Sebastian can think of anything to say. He’d had a hundred plans, if it worked. A faery Lord caught by a circle, lured by bread and honey and bound in blood – well, Sebastian had plans, that’s all.

Past tense. Had.

Moriarty’s not bound at all. He squares his shoulders off as Sebastian watches, turning from the bread to face Sebastian more fully. Seb’s holed up by the dumpster – with an old revolver in his pocket and a stitch of holly wound around the barrel, for all the good it will do him. There’s a secondary circle of protection between him and the Unseelie Lord, but it’s paper-thin and getting weaker by the second. Sebastian shouldn’t even be catching glamour through it – but Moriarty’s hitting him full force, all dark eyes and elegant bones and sharp lines in his tailored suit.

If he went for the barrier Seb’d be dead in a heartbeat. He knows that. He’s seen it.

_They eat the hearts and eyes first – delicacies – the brain second and the bones last, because the marrow gets bitter with sins –_

Sebastian takes a long, shuddering breath. Moriarty still shows no interest in rushing the barrier. The fae lord bends down to flip over the honey-soaked bread at his feet. The pale skin of his thumb is whiter than the inside flesh of the loaf. It’s startling against the bright red of Sebastian’s blood; a smear on the bottom of the crust where the honey won’t cover, the hook at the bottom of the bait. Moriarty swipes his thumb over it and straightens, coming up with his hand red with blood, brighter than the drying stuff on his palm.

His tongue is startlingly pink. He laps at Sebastian’s blood delicately, eyes shut, his lashes dark on his cheeks.

“Mmm. Interesting. A fair bit of power, there, if you’d learn to concentrate.” He glances up and catches Sebastian watching. There’s something gleaming in Moriarty’s black eyes, malicious and sharp and entirely inhuman. “Little bit of fae in your bloodline, though I bet you didn’t know.”

Sebastian makes some noise which might vaguely manage to be a question, and Moriarty nods thoughtfully.

“A brownie, actually, rather than a changeling –“ he continues, more to himself than Sebastian – “They can get too close to the households, I suppose. Unusual, though.” There’s that flicker, again, in Moriarty’s eyes. Inhuman. Moriarty runs his tongue over his top lip and Sebastian’s hit by another wave of the glamour: so thick he’d fall over if he wasn’t leaning on the dumpster. Hot desire lurches in his stomach, mindless and demanding, and for a moment his head reels dizzily and he can’t think anything at all. He wants. So badly. He doesn’t care if Moriarty tears him apart – Sebastian _wants._

He can taste it already – the thick slide of Moriarty’s flesh into his mouth, the hard twist of Moriarty’s fist in his hair – the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes as Moriarty takes him, and –

Somehow, Sebastian wrenches himself to a halt at the edge of his circle of protection. He’s stumbled forward, drawn by the glamour like a beast in heat. The revolver is gone – not that it was much use anyways – and his lips feel wet already when he licks them.

Moriarty’s smile hasn’t faded an inch. “Interesting,” he repeats.

Sebastian hits his knees with a wet slap of bone against pavement, simply because he lacks enough strength to stay standing. He realizes he hasn’t said anything, and doesn’t know how long it’s been since he last did. He feels like he’s been staring at Moriarty, in silence, for a lifetime.

_I wonder if I’ll remember tomorrow – if I survive to tomorrow – if I’ll think about this for the rest of my life –_

In the stories, people come back from meeting faeries, and they starve to death for want of fae food. Nothing in the human world satisfies – nothing in the human world tempts –

Sebastian sways on his knees.

“You know,” Moriarty says, softly. “The legends of vampires started with us. The bloodsucking things in the night. They aren’t real.” He takes a step forward. The distance between them closes, wet pavement disappearing beneath Moriarty’s shining black shoes. “There are worse things in the Court, though. Dark things. And we still – occasionally – “ Moriarty reaches out and brushes away Sebastian’s circle of protection like it’s cobwebs. “Occasionally, we still crave – “

His fingertips are like ice on Sebastian’s face. He tilts Sebastian’s head back – way back – until Sebastian’s throat is bared and Seb can feel every pulse of blood against the taut skin.

“- And we still wait for an invitation,” Moriarty finishes, as a whisper.

“Please,” Sebastian asks him, “Please.”


End file.
